efore the river fairly widens into an
estuary, there stood a certain hostel, or inn, which it was my joy and
my sorrow to haunt. It stood by the water's edge in a kind of little
garden of its own; a dreary place, where a few sickly plants tried to
hold their own against neglect and the splashings of rinsed glasses.
There was a wooden terrace at the back of this place--the back
overlooked the river, while the front was on the by-road--and here the
habitual revellers, the haunters, whose scored crosses lent the creaking
shutters an unnatural whiteness over their weather-beaten surface, dark
with age and dirt, loved to linger of a summer evening, and ply the
noggin and fill the pipe.

There was an old fiddler, a kind of Orpheus of the slums, who would
sometimes creep in there and take his post in a corner and begin to
play, happy if the mad lads threw him halfpence, or thrust a
half-drained tankard under his tearful old nose: happy, too, if they did
not--as they often did--toss the cannikin at him out of mere lightness
of heart and drunkenness of wit. He used to play the quaintest old
tunes, odd border-side ballad airs, that seemed to go apace with blithe
country weddings and decent pastoral merry-makings of all kinds, and to
be strangely out of suits with that brotherhood of rakehells, smugglers,
and desperadoes who gambled and drank, and swore and quarrelled, while
the poor old fellow worked his catgut.

Lord, Lord, how the memory of it all comes back upon me while I write! I
have but to close my eyes, and my fancy brings me back to that alehouse
by the river, to a summer's eve with its golden shafts falling on the
dingy woodwork and lending it a pathetic glory, upon the shining space
of dwindled water in the middle of its banks of glistening mud, and
there in the corner the pinched old rogue in his ragged bodygear
scraping away at 'Barbara Allen,' or 'When first I saw thy face,' or
'The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington,' while the leering rascals in the
pilot coats and the flap-eared caps huddled together over their filthy
tables, and swigged their strong drink and thumbed their greasy cards
and swore horribly in all the lingoes of Babel.

One such summer evening surges up before me with a crimson smear across
its sunlight. There was a Low Country fellow there, waist deep in
schnapps, and a Finlander sucking strong beer like a hog. Meinheer and
the Finn came to words and blows, and I, who was sitting astride of the
ra